Quantification of skeletal uptake in conventional bone scanning

This paper describes a simple method for the analysis of whole-body bone metabolism and summarizes possible applications in patients suffering from metabolic bone diseases. Quantification of bone uptake, soft-tissue retention and urinary excretion of radiopharmaceuticals both for diagnostics such as 99mTc-HDP and 186Re-HEDP and 153Sm-EDTMP for radionuclide therapy is achieved by regions-of-interest analysis of conventional bone scans. The data obtained allow a comparison between different osteotropic radiopharmaceuticals as well as an improved and reliable dosimetry compared to the most frequently applied method of whole-body retention measurement by simple analysis of urinary excretion. Moreover, estimation of whole-body bone uptake using the described technique can be helpful for the diagnosis of systemic bone disease in which bone scanning does not reveal focal pathologies. The method described here is routinely applicable in daily clinical routine and the data are well in line with those obtained by other methods. (orig.)